Penguin Classics Research Articles

‘Novelty’ through narrative and paratextual voice: The case of John Minford’s translation of ‘The laughing girl’

‘The Laughing Girl’ (‘Yingning’) is a short fictional story from Liaozhai zhiyi, a collection of uncanny and surreal stories written by the Chinese writer Pu Songling between the 1660s and 1720s. The stories have been made available for anglophone readers as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio published in 2006, canonised by Penguin Classics and the translator John Minford, whose approach rooted in ‘nouvelle Chinoiserie’ imbues the tales with a sense of novelty or strangeness, both textually and paratextually. In this study, we will investigate how Minford foregrounds the story’s novelty with his translator’s voice in the translated text. Comparison and analysis reveal that on the textual level, Minford’s shifting focalisation and narrative voice accentuates the strangeness in ‘The Laughing Girl’ and that his additions in terms of characterisation construct Yingning an even more outlandish fox spirit. On the paratextual level, he foregrounds the text’s novelty at the expense of other themes, such as the moral edification or social critique. Minford’s unique perspective on and approach to the source text align with the publisher’s aim to appeal to a general readership, leading him to highlight the text’s exoticism in his translation. Although Minford’s translation is both accessible and stylistically deft, it appears to reduce Strange Tales to a mere anthology of the bizarre and grotesque while constructing an ‘imagined and ethereal orient’, as is clearly indicated by the corpus-assisted readers’ reception analysis.

Retranslated Chinese classical canon Journey to the West: a stylometric comparison between Julia Lovell’s retranslation and Arthur Waley’s translation

Abstract Journey to the West (西游记; Xi You Ji) is one of the best-known classic novels in Chinese literature, and it has been translated into English by various notable translators. This study compares the retranslation of the novel by Julia Lovell published in “Penguin Classics” in 2021 with Arthur Waley’s translation in “Penguin Classics” in 1973. Employing a stylometric approach to compare the styles of the two translations, it uses the corpus tools of word lists, keyword analysis, and function word analysis. The results reveal distinct stylistic differences in the translators’ styles, including lexical density, sentence length, and function words, which point to different translation strategies employed by the two translations of this classic Chinese novel. The book reviews published so far indicate that Lovell’s version has been well received by contemporary Anglophone readers and that the changes in this retranslation may have helped to explain the recanonization of the original classic. This study provides new insights into the understanding of the differences between translation and retranslation, and thus has implications for the fields of translator style studies and stylometry research.

The Spread and Reception of “Penguin Classics” Chinese Literary Translation in the English World

This article will set the penguin classics in Chinese literature translation in the English world the transmission range of readership and accept the situation, from the spread of translation materials, translation mode, sponsors and publishing model, the target language country’s ideology, etc., to interpret cultural classic in the world of circulation process, description influence the spread of Chinese literature external factors, in order to study the real power of global circulation of Chinese literature, translation and publishing and communication model in order to promote Chinese literature more effectively into the English world, expand overseas readers group put forward the theoretical thinking and practical guidance.

Emotional Management of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe's Main Character

This study aims to describe and reveal the main character's emotional management in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a Penguin classics novel published in London in 1994. This study employs a descriptive qualitative technique and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach. The research data was derived from the novel's narrations and portrayal of the main character. The study found that the main character's psychology employed a defensive mechanism to regulate all the emotions that arose. The main character in this work uses suppression, rationalization, reaction construction, regression, anger and indifference, and imagination. Repression serves as the main character's protection mechanism in the narrative. The main character demonstrated that he attempted to channel his melancholy into thankfulness and to turn his anxiety into rational thinking.

The Solitary Mind in the Anatomy of Melancholy

The Solitary Mind in <i>the Anatomy of Melancholy</i>

Narrative Materiality and The Contemporary Book

Narrative Materiality and The Contemporary Book David Wylot (bio) 1. HAPPY READING In 2019, the publishing house Penguin Books ran an advertising campaign across the UK for its imprint Penguin Classics entitled "Happy Reading." The campaign comprised of photographs of individually owned books from the Penguin Classics range that have been handled, used, and thoroughly read. One campaign poster, for instance, displayed a copy of CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S Jane Eyre (1847) complete with bent cover, annotation labels, and the marks of a book worn with use.1 More than just a celebration of their stories and worlds, the campaign sought to vividly display (and sell) readers' physical encounters with the printed book. As its promotional material stated, each book photographed "tells a story of its own, through its cracked spine, dog-eared pages, scribbled margins or its missing cover."2 The story contained by the book is only half of the book's story. Penguin's attention to readers' tactile handling of the book is clearly attentive to what Leah Price terms "the manual dimension of reading," and in this respect, the campaign is strikingly contemporary.3 "Happy Reading," after [End Page 71] all, notably appears at a time when the sociology, media history, and literary study of the book and of reading have captured the attention of the academy. This coincidence need not be limited to criticism either. Twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction, as many remark, has increasingly turned to a thematic and formal emphasis on the materiality of its printed inscription in response to a changing digital media landscape.4 An archive of this material might include the textual experimentation of Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves (2000), Ali Smith's printing of two versions of How to Be Both (2014), Chris Ware's book-in-a-box graphic novel Building Stories (2012), or Nicola Barker's typographic play in H(A)PPY (2017), but also less explicitly experimental texts that explore the permutations of their bookish form, such as James Smythe's No Harm Can Come to a Good Man (2014), discussed shortly. As Jessica Pressman suggests, these literary engagements with the "bookishness" of the codex book "describe an aesthetic practice and cultural phenomenon that figures the book as artifact rather than as just a medium for information transmission and, in so doing, presents the book as a fetish for our digital age."5 In this scholarship's expansion, however, less has been made of the impact of the book on readers' comprehension of narrative. In cases where it has been, the textual archive has remained largely pre-twentieth century; likewise, media-conscious narrative theory has often turned to nonprint media due to verbal narrative structure's dominance in narratology.6 Yet the rise of "bookish" books, coupled with renewed focus on the material dimension of reading, clearly invites reconsideration of narrative comprehension attentive to this form. This essay therefore asks two related questions. First, what kinds of narrative dynamics should we look to when incorporating the printed book into a consideration of narrative? And second, what can bookish form make perceptible of twenty-first-century digital culture amid the proliferation of new forms of reading, writing, and consuming narrative? I consider both by way of an analysis of James Smythe's British science fiction novel No Harm Can Come to a Good Man.7 Despite lacking the experimental aesthetics normally associated with "bookish" books, No Harm thematically reckons [End Page 72] with the bounded nature of its printed form to offer vivid reflection on the book's narrative temporalities. The novel follows the story of Laurence Walker, a U.S. senator running for nomination in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, whose political campaign runs aground once a ubiquitous data service called ClearVista, italicized throughout, predicts that he has 0% chance of success. ClearVista, which offers users forecasts of the likelihood of seemingly any event in a digitally quantified world, provides the novel's speculative vision for the methods of capture, "datafication," and statistical forecasting that underpin the technological and ideological regime of "big data" in the twenty-first century.8 It is a technology that, as Laurence is told, "finds out everything about...

Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom

This article offers a set of race-conscious approaches to teaching premodern Arabic texts in translation, tailored to courses in Islamic studies and related subject areas. Throughout, I address the productive tension generated by the fact that many contemporary translations do not consistently signpost moments of racial thinking as such despite the increase in scholarship on medieval race and racism as well as in the call, on the part of students, to grapple with racialization in our course materials. On the one hand, I argue that such translations can perpetuate what Kimberlé Crenshaw dubs “perspectivelessness” by discursively disengaging from race in various ways, but on the other, I contend that this opens opportunities for critical reading of translation practices as well as of the historical source texts themselves. I offer guided readings of nine Arabic texts in translation from two major press series—Penguin Classics and the Library of Arabic Literature—that lend themselves to classroom use, in which I demonstrate how to foster reading with race in mind. In doing so, I offer an extended meditation on racialization as a comparative and historicizable hermeneutic for understanding premodern Islamic histories and literatures.

Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics by Cathy McAteer

Reviewed by: Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics by Cathy McAteer Emily Lygo Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics. By Cathy McAteer. (BASEES/Routledge Series in Russian and East European Studies) London: Routledge. 2021. xxix+196 pp. £120. ISBN 978–0–36750–348–2. Cathy McAteer's fascinating study explores the important role of the Penguin Russian Classics series in bringing Russian literature to the UK readership. McAteer examines the historical background to this series, exploring the circumstances of its creation while introducing the key figures involved (Chapter 1); presents a microhistory of one of Penguin's most prolific translators from Russian, David Magarshack, whose tenure spanned the 1950s and early 1960s (Chapter 2); discusses Magarshack's translation theory and practice in the light of both Soviet and more recent, predominantly Western, translation theory (Chapter 3); and finally, she gives an analytical account of changes involving new translators and Penguin's move to translating contemporary, Soviet-era literature from the 1960s onwards (Chapter 4). McAteer's account uses extensive material from the Penguin archive to reveal behind-the-scenes arrangements for (and discussions around) the translation of major works of Russian literature. In itself this material is fascinating, especially for those readers whose acquaintance with Russian literature began with translations from this series. McAteer's discovery of an unpublished manuscript on translation theory by David Magarshack complements her analysis of his commissioned work for Penguin Books, which is based upon archival sources. By contextualizing his ideas with reference to Soviet translation theory, she examines the significance of individual translators' identities and aspirations: as a Russian émigré, Magarshack was influenced by developments in conceptualizing translation that were happening in the USSR as well as the guiding principles of E. V. Rieu's Penguin Classics. He was also anxious to be recognized as an authority on literature both in the UK and in Russia. By comparing Magarshack's versions of Dostoevskii with those of more recent Penguin translators of the same novels, McAteer provides an in-depth diachronic analysis of translation approaches and strategies. McAteer clearly positions her study and arguments in terms of translation theory, signalling her subject's significance beyond Russian Studies. At times her terminology and theoretical references imported from Translation Studies seem somewhat heavy-handed and unnecessary; that knowledge of the background, training, situation, and so on of translators is essential to understand their motivation and practice is a sufficiently common-sense assumption not to require theoretical underpinning. Her arguments for greater nuance in translation theory are engaging and convincing, however. McAteer's point that Bourdieu makes 'over-generalised' [End Page 524] statements about the opposition between intellectuals and owners of industry and business (p. 150) is a welcome challenge to the former's rather dogmatic binary categories, which risk discarding the varied experiences and models of publisher–translator relations. Her history of Penguin's creation of the Classics series is a persuasive example of how complex such relations can be, and, indeed, how they change over time and between individuals. This book moves convincingly from theory to practice, describing the precarious position of translators in a world where the increasing pressure of commercial viability, as well as the shift from translating nineteenth-century classics to contemporary, Soviet literature, significantly altered Penguin's practice. McAteer demonstrates how analysis of archived correspondence, together with awareness of the evolving role of paratexts, can facilitate understanding of the social and professional contexts of translators for this Penguin series. This monograph will be of great interest to scholars of Translation Studies, since McAteer's nuanced and rounded approach to translation history provides an excellent case study of a major publisher's series of translated texts. Her observations on translation publishing culture point to very interesting changes not only in the formal status of translators, but also in their training, backgrounds, and professionalism. Penguin's Russian Classics form a fascinating aspect of the history of Russian literature in Britain, and McAteer's book will also interest scholars in the field of Anglo-Russian cultural relations and interactions. Emily Lygo University of Exeter Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Shoals

Shoals Pia Tafdrup (bio) Translated by David McDuff (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Don’t just aim the telescopeat the night sky’s swarmingto discover one more planet. Turn it also toward the earth,toward the bottom of the sea,see the fish in between the rocks, a flicker of silver arrows,a glow of fire in the depths,the blunt force of fibers, the water burnswhen the fish shoot their way forwardand stop submerged in the seaweed gardens, look also toward the bottom of the sea,shoals of fish irradiate the darkness there,find rest in the waves. Translation from the Danish [End Page 27] Pia Tafdrup Danish poet Pia Tafdrup (www.tafdrup.com) has published twenty collections of poetry, including Queen’s Gate (2001), Tarkovsky’s Horses and Other Poems (2010), Salamander Sun and Other Poems (2015), and The Taste of Steel • The Smell of Snow (2021). She is the recipient of the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (1999) and the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy (2006). Berøringen af hud (The touch of skin), the last book in her series about the senses, just appeared in Denmark. Photo by Isak Hoffmeyer David McDuff David McDuff (b. 1945) is a Scottish translator, editor, and literary critic. His translations include works of nineteenth-century Russian fiction in Penguin Classics and Nordic poetry from Bloodaxe. In 2021 he was honored with the Swedish Academy’s Interpretation Prize (Tolkningspris). Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

City Profile: Manchester, England

City ProfileManchester, England Joshua Allan (bio) Books for Your Table in Chetham’s Reading Room Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Manchester Happened Oneworld, 2019 Elizabeth Gaskell Mary Barton Penguin Classics, 1997 W. G. Sebald The Emigrants Trans. Michael Hulse New Directions, 2016 Click for larger view View full resolution “THE CITY CENTRE was at once beautiful and scary. . . . The infrastructure alone— of brick and stone—was forbidding. The skyline—dotted by conical, sharp church steeples and tall chimneys—made him feel trapped. . . . Manchester brought to mind a Christian heaven of arches and arches, spires, steeples, pews and church bells. But why would the British sculpt snarling devils on their walls when they lived in such dark misty environs?” This is how Manchester looks to the outsider, or more specifically to the Ugandan immigrant Abu, the protagonist in the first story in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s new collection, Manchester Happened. The date is 1950, but it could just as easily be 1800, when church steeples and mill chimneys clogged the smoky skyline like a chessboard midmatch. And it could just as easily be today, when, even though spire and chimney have given way to flat and office block, the city is still renowned for its gloomy atmosphere and the gothic, industrial architecture that confronts visitors at every turn. Despite—or rather, because of—Manchester’s tenebrous reputation, the city has continued to attract writers for centuries. The beginning of Jane Eyre was written on the site where Manchester Metropolitan University now stands. Head north and you’ll find Chetham’s Library, the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, where Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her novels in a house on Plymouth Grove—you can still visit it. W. G. Sebald, who came to Manchester to teach, set the final, and most melancholic, part of The Emigrants against the foggy backdrop of “the sprawling mass of Manchester . . . a fire almost suffocated in ash.” My brother lives in a converted mill featured in one of the novel’s black-and-white photographs. If the photo had been taken from the other side, a few decades later, it would have displayed a sign that my brother misread as “burgers” (American cuisine is now ubiquitous in the city). It is in fact a sign for the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, a tribute to the writer who took the opposite trajectory from Sebald by leaving the city as soon as he could. But the “Manchester of frightful slums and hard-head magnates and cotton brokers gorging red meat in chophouses,” “the mother of liberalism and the cradle of the entire industrial system,” never left him. I find myself in a similar position to Burgess, being continually drawn back to Manchester. The city has a staggering literary history, but it is perhaps more dynamic nowadays than it has ever been. Both universities boast renowned creative writing courses, with past and present teachers including Martin Amis, Jeanette Winter-son, Lemn Sissay, and Carol Ann Duffy. In 2017 it was named a unesco city of literature. And as the most linguistically diverse city in western Europe, the city’s status as a cultural wellspring has become indisputable. The “dark misty environs” might remain, but now anyone can feel at home. [End Page 5] Joshua Allan Joshua Allan works for Routledge books in Oxford, England, and writes extensively on the side. He has published in WLT, the Oxford Review of Books, Undercurrent Philosophy, Full Stop, Eunoia Review, and other magazines. Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

‘Psychoanalysis is one more way of taking people seriously’: Adam Phillips in conversation with Emma Williams

Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst and author. Phillips was educated at Clifton College and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He trained to be a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Child Psychology. Across the course of his professional career, he has worked at Guys Hospital, with a school for ‘maladjusted children’, at Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic and at Charing Cross Hospital in the Department of Child Psychiatry. He now works in private practice. Phillips is the author of many works, including Terrors and Experts (1997), In Writing: Essays on Literature (2016), Attention Seeking (2019) and his most recent book, The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2021). He also served as the General Editor of the New Penguin Classics Translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. The conversation begins by exploring the way mental health has become a topic of public interest as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunities and challenges in Phillips's experience working with schools and for young people's mental health services during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are then discussed. Questions about the nature of psychoanalysis are introduced, and the discussion turns towards the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. There is a brief discussion of connections between Phillips's work and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Phillips's essays on schools and education are explored in connection with ideas of omniscience, sadomasochism and ‘experiments in living’. The conversation ends with a glimpse of school as a place to cultivate one's interest and one's sociability with others.

McAteer , Cathy Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics (review)

REVIEWS 749 In summary, this is a fresh, well written and thoroughly researched study, full of original insights, that offers a comprehensive and holistic picture of Shestov’s philosophical heritage. It both does justice to Shestov’s thought in historical perspective, and convincingly highlights its contemporary relevance. School of Humanities, Language and Global Studies O. Tabachnikova University of Central Lancashire McAteer, Cathy. Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics. BASEES/ Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 140. Routledge, London and New York, 2021. xxx + 166 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Appendices. Index. £120.00; open access e-book. The early history of the British reception of Russian literature is well known. Following the sporadic appearance of translations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Crimean War generated more sustained interest, and by the end of the century, publishers had recognized there was a definite market for Russian literature. Some developed close partnerships with particular translators. Heinemann’s collaboration with Constance Garnett from 1892 to 1920 is justly renowned for bringing the work of Turgenev, Dostoevskii and Chekhov into the British canon of foreign literature, though Vizetelly’s earlier publication of Frederick Whishaw’s translations and Constable’s and Oxford University Press’s associations with Stephen Graham and Aylmer and Louise Maude respectively, were also important. Graham edited ‘Constable’s Russian Library’, for example, one of several series of Russian writing in English that appeared during the First World War, as publishers capitalized on the wartime alliance with Russia. In Translating Great Russian Literature, Cathy McAteer examines Russian literature’s place in a later, more familiar series, probably in fact the bestknown book series in British publishing: Penguin Classics. As Constable, Hodder and Stoughton, and Maunsel had responded to a market for Russian literature created by the First World War, so during the Second World War, Penguin began to investigate a market that had become more sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In their main list, they published books on recent Soviet history, politics and society, and in 1945 the company founded the Penguin Russian Review ‘to contribute to the initiation of the stranger to Russia into the spirit of the Russian people as it is embodied in their history and literature, their arts and sciences, their philosophy, their aspiration, and their economic life’. ‘No other post-war nation qualified for similar Penguin Review treatment’, McAteer notes (p. 3). But the Review cost more to produce than it earned and SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 750 was discontinued in 1948 after four issues. For McAteer, though, the openly idealistic aims of the postwar Review go some way towards explaining the high profile of Russian literature in the new Penguin Classics series, launched in 1946. The first version of the series under the general editorship of E. V. Rieu, the so-called ‘medallion’ series (1950–62), included sixteen translations from Russian literature, more than any other modern literature bar French — twice as many as from Italian, and five times as many as from Spanish. McAteer’s monograph, packed with interesting detail, is a timely contribution to Russian studies, translation studies and book history. As she makes clear in her introduction and conclusion, she is particularly interested in expanding the methodology of translation studies by bringing approaches derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s literary sociology to bear on archival research into publishers’, translators’ and authors’ archives, and comparative textual analysis of translations and their source texts. Her avowed aim is to recover how the approach of individual translations was produced not only by their translators, but by a network of individuals over time. This brings much of interest to light. The impact of Rieu’s powerfully domesticating approach to translation and his conception of ‘the Penguin public’ is particularly striking. Writing to Elisaveta Fen about her translation of Ivanov, he remarks, ‘I still contend that the best way to get the characters across is to make them say everything they have to say in the most English way, however foreign the sentiment may be to us’ (p. 21). The fact that Rieu’s ‘principle of equivalent effect’ was cited as a source of Eugene Nida’s ‘principles of correspondence’ in 1964...

Acts of humanity: the Wakley Prize 2021

The characters of George Eliot's novel Middlemarch live through momentous times. It is the early 19th century. The railways are cutting mercilessly through the English countryside; Parliamentary reform is in the air, viciously debated at hustings and in the popular press; and in London, a new journal by the name of The Lancet has put the country's medical profession in an uproar. But this is not a story of great personages and heroic deeds. It is the tale of the choices made by individual people from diverse circumstances, the sort who might be well known in their local communities, but are destined to be forgotten by history. Yet Eliot asserts that their lives have importance. At the novel's conclusion, she writes that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. 1 Eliot G Middlemarch. Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth1987 Google Scholar Eliot, in other words, maintains that “unhistoric acts”—small incidents of kindness, care, compassion, and conscience—can provide a shield against the evils of the world, and be a potent force for good. For this year's Wakley Prize, we are interested in essays that take place on a human scale in health-care and community settings, across their diversity of environments, of the “hidden life” whose contact with others provides moments of care, witness, challenge, humour, healing, understanding, or recovery. Medicine is, after all, largely defined by such acts of humanity in clinical encounters. They may be unresolved, transformative, unifying, or part of continuing care.

‘The world is sinking:’ sand, urban infrastructure, and world-cities

ABSTRACT From the construction of ports to the dredging of access corridors for ships and the production of asphalt and concrete, sand is an inextricable part of urban environments. Focusing on the molecular transformations of sand–from silt to concrete to rubble–the first half of this paper studies the geosocial history of Dubai over the course of the twentieth century, including the dredging of Dubai Creek, the making of Jebel Ali Port, and the construction of the World Islands. I draw on reports, archival records, and newspapers, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate the infrastructural exuberance of Dubai, its tendency to marshal vast amounts of sand in the construction of increasingly outrageous infrastructures. In the second half of the paper, I follow some of the threads that emerge from this site in a more theoretical and comparative register. I draw comparisons between Dubai and similar world–cities in the global South, to understand and critique how this infrastructural exuberance exists alongside increasing concerns over ‘sand scarcity'. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille (1991. The accursed share: volume 1: consumption, tr. by Hurley, R. New York: Zone Books), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983. Anti–oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, tr. by Hurley, R. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, tr. by Massumi, B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), and McKenzie Wark (2015. Molecular red: theory for the anthropocene. New York: Verso), I develop a framework of antiproductive ecologies that treats incommensurable forms of surplus and waste (such as sand and rubble) as constitutive of world–cities. Developing Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘antiproduction’ from an environmental perspective, I argue that in their exuberance and thirst for construction, world–cities like Dubai attempt to organize and render productive the very planetary distribution of sand and silt.

Hubris of absenteeism

Harnessing Walter Benjamin’s [2009. One way street and other writing. London: Penguin Classics] Eingedenken and Jetztzeit along with the co-author’s notion of the Absent (a term in impossible redemption) into insurgent allegorical devices, are useful in reassembling reflections of ‘Time Flies’: a treasure hunt led performance project co-created by the co-authors between 2008 and 2018. The reflective essay is made in three parts (or theatrical acts) and prescribes to three themes: (i) absence, (ii) foolishness and (iii) remembrance. These three parts occur through an embodiment of absent authorship, made as a point of considering how the project and ideas collate into allegorical absence in reconsidering colonial space in the post-colonial city.

The Writings of Phillis Wheatley ed. by Vincent Carretta

Reviewed by: The Writings of Phillis Wheatley ed. by Vincent Carretta April Langley (bio) The Writings of Phillis Wheatley vincent carretta, ed. Oxford University Press, 2019 226 pp. From start to finish, Vincent Carretta's The Writings of Phillis Wheatley (Writings) is the book I wished had been available when I taught my first course of early American literature more than twenty years ago. It is one that will quickly become a standard for instruction at all levels, [End Page 635] from K–12 teachers to undergraduate- and graduate-level professors to postgraduate instructors in early Anglo-, Euro-, and African American literature and history courses. For those instructors most familiar with Carretta's 2001 Penguin Classics version, you will recognize some subtle but important differences: timeline, extended introduction, and prefatory details that bring the most current historical context to her published and variant poetry and her life, freedom, marriage, and death. Of course, of critical significance is Wheatley's 1776 letter to Obour Tanner, discovered in 2005. Far from being a reprint, the 2019 Writings provides the fullest recovery of the early Black revolutionary poet and her works published, to date. Carretta brings the best of all archival and secondary resources available to this text. To begin with, the timeline contextualizes Wheatley for students to gain a better understanding of her works and her position within the political milieux of eighteenth-century Boston as it provides dates for such watershed events in colonial American history as the Seven Years' War, the Stamp Act (passage and repeal), the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Mansfield ruling, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, the timeline also locates Wheatley geographically in such a way that instructors and students can consider the cultural and national contexts within which her publications and responses, especially variants, can be analyzed. Importantly, seemingly small details such as John Wheatley's death and the disposition of his estate, having left "PW nothing in his will" (xvii), and Wheatley's marriage, death, and that of her husband John Peters provide a handy reference point that permits quick reviews of dates, names, and publication sources of relevance to the poet's life and works. Writings also provides in one accessible text a correction of previous errors in the Wheatley bio-bibliography, as well as a rich selection of verified sources of Wheatley scholarship from which instructors and students alike can peer into the crevices of the extra textual and companion works as they glean from the insights provided by the diverse scholarly works listed in "Further Reading" section (including but not limited to an excellent supplemental work, Carretta's own Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage [U of Georgia P, 2011]). Indeed, the scholarship identified is as varied as Wheatley's own muses, and instructors will appreciate the foundational works therein as ones that will put students on a secure footing in their study of Wheatley as well as engage them in a deeper learning [End Page 636] experience of the poet's varied use of genres and writing style (e.g., elegiac, neoclassical, biblical paraphrase, occasional, and epistle) to address diverse contemporary and historical issues (personal, political, and religious)—underscoring the truly inclusive nature of Wheatley's Poems and Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—for a twenty-first-century student of American literature. The introduction engages students and enables rich class discussions about prevailing questions in early American literary history with regard to the enslaved African poet's agency and her "network of associations … in London … North American and Britain" (xx) and details the "terms" under which Wheatley "compelled" her manumission (xx), her "business acumen," and "anti-slavery stance" (xxi). Importantly, Writings allows a study of this author that is not so overly laden with references that it obscures the literary works. At the same time, prefatory details about "manuscript versions" and revisions invite consideration of the poet's "developing skill" (xxiii) and her "proto-national" strain. Additionally, insights regarding audience and reception of her published works in publication and prepublication records are invaluable to the novice and expert alike. Such features also offer concise historical, political, religious, and personal contexts...

Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me

Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me Nicole Graev Lipson (bio) My mother smoked before she had us. In a sepia polaroid from the early seventies, she holds a cigarette between two lacquered fingertips. She wears, impossibly, a catsuit, and hair falls over her shoulders in glossy waves as she leans into my father, squeezing his cheeks and grinning. He is in trouble—oh, is he in trouble. Alone in the house as a teenager, I would rummage under silk scarves and lint brushes to get to this photo at the bottom of my mother’s drawer. It was the sole window into a side of her I didn’t know—the side that lounged on loveseats and took long drags from skinny cigarettes, smoke plunging deep as her neckline. The mother I knew taught elementary school. She wore Nina Ricci perfume and houndstooth blazers and combs in her hair. She drank orange juice and sprinkled her food with lecithin. She most certainly did not smoke. Except when she did. One cigarette a day, 365 days a year, for the twenty-four years she was married to my father. One cigarette, slipped under her sleeve before the dog’s evening walk, a secret that smoldered on her fingers and lips as she circled our block in the dark. My father didn’t know. My brother didn’t know. None of us would know until years later—after an even bigger secret burned to the surface, blazing through our lives like a five-alarm fire. [End Page 121] ________ My freshman year in college, I read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening for a Feminist Fictions course. There are books that seem to glide into our lives at a particular time as if by design, finishing thoughts just partially formed in our mind. I remember feeling this way as I read The Awakening, rooting at every step for heroine Edna Pontellier, the fin-de-siècle wife and mother who breaks from social convention to explore the creative and sensual parts of her being. Edna rejects her staid marriage and pursues an affair. She moves out of her marital home, with its schedules and servants, and into a small cottage, drawing and dreaming of her lover. Do all good girls edging toward womanhood fall in love with Edna? Maybe so, but in my own private falling, I was thrillingly alone. Away from home for the first time, free for the first time to consider what rules I wanted to live by, I read the whole novella in one sitting. In Edna’s stirrings, I came face-to-face with my own. During the day, I attended classes, wrote outlines, made the dean’s list. At night, I pressed myself into strangers, cracking through the walls of my body and all that had ever defined me. Twenty-five years later, I still have my Penguin Classics edition of The Awakening and Selected Stories. It lives on a bookshelf outside my youngest daughter’s room, a bookshelf crammed full floor to ceiling. There are my pedagogy books from graduate school and my Shakespeare plays from teaching; there are my husband Paul’s business school textbooks and Latin American guidebooks and Jonathan Franzen novels; there are What to Expect When You’re Expecting and How to Raise a Jewish Child. It’s an unlikely library, the kind only marriage can create, two readers conjoined on the shelves as one. As I carried my daughter to bed a few months ago, my eye fell on the Chopin book. I lingered for a moment, her three-year-old legs dangling over my hips, and pulled it from the shelf. Later, the three kids asleep, Paul at his computer, I lay on the couch and opened its yellowing pages. There were notes all over the margins, written in purple pen—the scrawled insights of a girl I’d long ago outgrown. Must listen to own desires, she wrote. Strength in solitude, she wrote. How strange it was to discover this person was still with me—that she’d been with me, still and patient, all along. ________ In October, Paul and I will celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. We’ve...

Thanks for Typing: Women’s Roles in Editions and Translations of Arthurian Literature in Penguin Classics, 1959–1985

Abstract Based on documentary research undertaken in the Penguin Archive in the University of Bristol’s Special Collections, this article highlights various ways in which women’s often invisible labour contributed to the publication of editions and translations of medieval and early modern Arthurian literature in the mid- to late-twentieth century. The discussion includes a range of roles and individuals involved in bringing Arthurian literature to publication, including the academics commissioned to undertake translations, the editors and administrators in Penguin’s employ, as well as secretaries, wives, readers and other figures operating outside of Penguin. The article attempts a recuperation of the women’s labour involved in bringing Arthurian literature to the masses, and celebrates their part in the establishment and perpetuation of Arthurian Studies as a discipline.

ROUGH PLASTER

The Yale ReviewVolume 107, Issue 2 p. 52-52 POETRY ROUGH PLASTER BERNARD O'DONOGHUE, BERNARD O'DONOGHUE Published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.Search for more papers by this author BERNARD O'DONOGHUE, BERNARD O'DONOGHUE Published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.Search for more papers by this author First published: 28 March 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/yrev.13475AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume107, Issue2April 2019Pages 52-52 RelatedInformation

Emilia Pardo Bazán (1990): The House of Ulloa, Translated with an introduction by Paul O’Prey and Lucia Graves, London, Penguin Classics, pp. 270

Emilia Pardo Bazán (1990): The House of Ulloa, Translated with an introduction by Paul O’Prey and Lucia Graves, London, Penguin Classics, pp. 270